Opera Mail becomes an independent application

Recently uprooted from the comfortable confines of its browser, the Opera Mail app is now available as a standalone application. The company promises a leaner, meaner email client, but does it really deliver?

Opera Mail certainly isn’t overflowing with features you’re never going to use. It’s got a tabbed interface, so you can open multiple messages at the same time and flip among them. Message are displayed as threads by default, allowing you easy access to the whole conversation.

What kind of mail accounts can you use with Opera? Only POP and IMAP. And all you’ll be doing is reading and composing email. Opera Mail doesn’t do RSS or newsgroups, nor does it let you join IRC channels. It’s not the old Opera browser’s communication components pulled out and sandwiched together. It’s just mail.

Opera fans will also be disappointed by the sparse customization options. The Opera Mail interface can be tweaked somewhat. The individual blocks in the email panel can be stacked in whatever order you like, and the panel itself can be positioned on the left or right side of the window. You can turn the status bar on or off. Buttons on the toolbar can be tailored to your personal needs.

What you can’t do is move every little piece of the interface around like you could with previous versions of Opera, and there’s no opera:config page that grants you access to fiddle with all its internals.

The new app is remarkably lightweight, using only about half the RAM on my Windows 8 system as Thunderbird does. That’d be a good thing if RAM was as critical an issue today as it was six years ago. The real difference between 75MB and 150MB isn’t even noticeable on a system with 8 or 16GB of memory.

That said, Opera Mail can only do a quarter of what Thunderbird can (chat, read newsgroups, manage your RSS feeds). So far, there just doesn’t seem to be a compelling reason to switch. And with such a small impact on resources it really makes you wonder why Opera bothered removing the mail app from its browser in the first place.